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UK's ITV Gearing Up For Autumn 2012 Rebrand

ITV is gearing up for its biggest brand refresh in more than six years as the company’s marketing chief begins to make his mark.

Group marketing and research director Rufus Radcliffe, who joined from Channel 4 in April last year, is examining the broadcaster’s family of channels and is understood to have been given the green light to introduce changes later this year.

Channel logos and on-screen idents are expected to be refreshed, possibly by September, with one source arguing that the company’s marketing had lagged behind some of its rivals in recent years.

Another source said that everything was under discussion in terms of taking the brand forward, but downplayed the possibility of wholesale changes, such as rethinking of the channel names.

The plans come just weeks after Radcliffe brought a £7m advertising account with agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty in-house. He now aims to turn ITV Creative into a formidable marketing unit, creating fast-turnaround campaigns across the broadcaster’s various media channels.

Radcliffe adopted a similar in-house strategy at C4, where he oversaw the relaunch of E4 and More 4, as well as introducing C4’s floating logo idents. He reports to director of television Peter Fincham, who took on responsibility for marketing in July last year.

ITV’s most recent major brand overhaul was in January 2006, when it ditched its old blue and yellow livery and introduced new on- and off-air logos for its channels.

Two years after the all-female reboot of the beloved 1980s franchise arrived, original star Dan Aykroyd is now promising that a true Ghostbusters 3, starring the three surviving OG ‘busters, is on its way. Many thought the death of Harold Ramis, who played Egon Spengler, in 2014 had put paid to a proper reunion, but Aykroyd’s comments suggest that we can look forward to him teaming up with Bill Murray and Ernie Hudson in the near future.

While speaking on The Big Interview With Dan Rather, the man fans know as Dr. Ray Stantz, the heart of the Ghostbusters agreed with Rather’s wording that he was talking about making a “full-blown third Ghostbusters,” with an unknown writer already currently working on the script. Obviously, Aykroyd wouldn’t let on to anything about story details, but he did tease that it’ll try and recapture what worked so well about the original films while giving it a “21st century” twist.

“I think we got a story that’s gonna work. It’s being written by a really goo…

Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP/REX/Shutterstock; Columbia Pictures (3); Everett Collection
If so, there's good news from the world of Gozer — there’s a new Ghostbusters movie in the works!

Entertainment Weekly has learned exclusively that Jason Reitman will direct and co-write an upcoming film set in the world that was saved decades previously by the proton pack-wearing working stiffs in the original 1984 movie, which was directed by his father, Ivan Reitman.

“I’ve always thought of myself as the first Ghostbusters fan, when I was a 6-year-old visiting the set. I wanted to make a movie for all the other fans,” Reitman says. “This is the next chapter in the original franchise. It is not a reboot. What happened in the ‘80s happened in the ‘80s, and this is set in the present day.”